UNSPOKEN (Chapter 14)

Where Do We Go From Here?

May 09, 2026

She didn’t plan to go.
She planned not to go.
There’s a difference.
Lagos traffic doesn’t care about either.
…….
Narrator’s Nook
Eighteen months.
That’s how long the door has been closed. Not locked — she never said locked. Just closed. The kind of closed that happens gradually, quietly, without a dramatic exit. One Sunday becoming the next Sunday becoming eighteen months of Sunday mornings that looked like sleeping in but were actually something more complicated than that.
And now it is Sunday morning.
And she is standing in her flat in Yaba arguing with herself.
I’m going to let her do it for a bit. It’s important that she does it herself.

ỌRỌ’S POV

TWO WEEKS AGO

I woke up at 7:15.

The service starts at 9:00 a.m..

CCI Yaba was seventeen minutes from my flat. I had looked this up on Thursday evening without deciding why I was looking it up. The address was already in my phone. I had not put it there consciously. At some point in the week my hands had done it without consulting me, the way hands sometimes knew things before the brain finished its committee meeting.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.

“You don’t have to go”, I told myself.

“It’s Sunday. You cooked yesterday. There’s leftover jollof. You have two minutes of recording homework to do and chapter four of The Speaker’s Code and Naked and Unashamed which you haven’t started yet. You have things to do here. Productive things. Important things.”

The ceiling offered no opinion.

“Also you don’t know what to wear to church anymore. You used to know. That was well over eighteen months ago. Dress codes may have changed. It would be embarrassing to arrive in the wrong thing. Better to wait until you’re more prepared.”

I looked at the ceiling for another moment.

Then I sat up.

Because even as I was constructing the argument I could hear Sewa’s voice in my head. The specific Sewa voice she used when she was watching me build an elaborate reason to not do something I needed to do. And the voice was saying:

Ọrọ. That is the most creative collection of excuses I have ever heard and I have known you for fourteen years.

I went to the bathroom.

I brushed my teeth.

I stood in front of my wardrobe.

Black dress. Simple. Below the knee. An outfit that said I am here with intention without saying I am trying too hard. Gold stud earrings — the graduation ones, which I had started reaching for more often since the pitch day, as if proximity to a thing that had witnessed something significant made it easier to go into other significant things.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

“You’re just going to sit”, I told my reflection.

“Nobody will talk to you. You’ll sit in the back. You’ll listen. You’ll leave when you need to. No performance required.”

The reflection looked like it believed me.

I picked up my phone, my keys, and my Bible.

I stopped at the door.

I looked at the Bible in my hand.

I had not carried it out since I graduated from the university. It had sat on the nightstand for eighteen months and I had been reaching for it at night and reading verses and putting it back down. Carrying it out was a different thing. Carrying it out meant something.

I put it in my bag anyway.

I opened the door.

I went.

•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•∆•

CCI Yaba was not what I expected.

I don’t know exactly what I had expected. The churches of my childhood, perhaps, with their particular architecture of obligation. The ironed clothes and the third pew and the standing when you were supposed to stand and sitting when you were supposed to sit and the performance of devotion that I had participated in for seventeen years without ever feeling that I was actually inside it.

This was different.

The building was remarkable from the outside. A converted space, clean, well-maintained, the kind of church that had grown into its location rather than been built for it. And inside, from the moment I stepped through the door, something was different. Not the breathtaking décor.

The atmosphere. The quality of air in a room where people had gathered because they wanted to be there.

I stood at the back for a moment.

The worship had already started. Not the sedate, processional worship of my childhood. This one was fuller and warmer. The music carried something that was both polished and genuine, which was a combination I hadn’t encountered before and which immediately made something in my chest go quiet in a way that was not uncomfortable.

I was directed to a seat near the back.

On the left side, away from the centre.

I sat.

The worship was doing something I had not prepared for.

The song they were singing, I didn’t know it. I had been outside churches for eighteen months and had missed whatever rotation had brought this song into circulation. It had a line that repeated.

A simple line. The kind that arrived in a song and stayed in the body long after the music ended.

You know my name. You know my name.

I sat in my chair at the back and I listened to over three hundred people sing You know my name and something happened in my chest that was not the drawstring pulling.

It was the opposite. Something loosening. Something that had been held tight for a very long time deciding, in this room, on this Sunday, that it could afford to release slightly.

I did not sing.

I was not ready to sing.

But I did not look at the floor. I looked at the front of the room, at the worship team, at the people around me with their hands raised or their eyes closed or simply their faces turned toward something I had been standing outside of for eighteen months.

You know my name.

I thought about Coach Smart’s question.

When did you first decide that being watched was dangerous?

And I thought about Isaiah 43. I have called you by name. You are mine.

And I thought about Psalm 139. You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

Every name I had been sitting with all week. Every voice. Every door.

I pressed my palms flat on my thighs. Not the desk gesture, but the same impulse, the steadying. And I let the music do what it was doing.

The pastor was a man in his mid-thirties. Clear-eyed, unhurried, the kind of communicator who did not perform authority but simply had it. Earned, not claimed.

He opened his Bible.

He said:

“Today I want to talk to the people who are in the room but not yet in the room.”

I went still.

“You know who you are”, he said.

“You came today. Maybe you haven’t been in a long time. Maybe you’ve never really been. Maybe not truly, not from the inside. You’re sitting here and part of you is present and part of you is still at the door. Still deciding. Still running the calculation of whether this is safe.”

He looked out at the congregation.

“I want to say something to that part of you”, he said. “The part that is still at the door.”

He paused.

“God is not waiting for you to be ready”, he said.

“He is not waiting for you to resolve your theology or finish your doubt or clean yourself up before you come in. He is at the door. He has been at the door. He has not been knocking loudly. That’s not His way. He has been knocking. Quietly. Consistently. Patiently, like a man in love who has nowhere else to be and no intention of leaving.”

The room was quiet.

“He knows your name”, the pastor said.

“I am not taking about the version you present. The one underneath. The whole name. And He is not frightened by it.”

Something in my chest cracked.

Not broke. Cracked. The way ice cracked when something warmer moved underneath it. A thin sound, internal, audible only to me.

I looked at my hands in my lap.

He knows your name.

Ọrọoluwa.

The Word of God.

Given to me at birth by parents who had no way of knowing how profoundly ironic it would become. The Word of God who spent twenty-four years making sure nobody heard her. Who built a management system so comprehensive and so invisible that she had forgotten it was a system and thought it was just herself.

I pressed my lips together.

The back of my eyes were doing the thing I had learned to manage in public spaces.

I managed it.

But only barely.

Then the communal prayer started.

And that was the part I had not prepared for.

Not a led prayer. Not one person speaking into a microphone while everyone else listened. Everyone. All at once. Over three hundred people in a room speaking to God simultaneously in tongues, their own voices. And a sound that was not chaotic but was full in the way of something that was alive and not performing being alive.

I sat in the middle of it.

Every person around me speaking.

And I was the only silent one.

Not because I was managing. Not because I had assessed the room and determined that silence was the correct response. But because I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Not from the drawstring, not from the management system. But from something different.

Something that felt like standing at the edge of a body of water and wanting to enter and not yet knowing if your legs would hold.

I wanted to pray.

I did not know how.

Not in this way. Not out loud, not in my own words or in tongues , not without a script or a liturgy or the borrowed language of a faith I had inhabited without inhabiting. I had the vocabulary. I had grown up with it. But vocabulary and voice were not the same thing. I knew this better than anyone.

I sat in the communal prayer and I did not speak and something in my eyes stopped being manageable.

One tear. Just one. Down the left cheek.

I pressed my fingers to my face immediately.

Nobody saw. Everyone around me was elsewhere in their own conversations with God, in their own rooms.

I sat there and I let the one tear happen and then I put it away and I breathed.

And in the breathing I said, silently, in the voice that lived furthest inside me, the truest and most private one:

“I don’t know how to do this. But I think I want to.”

That was all.

It was enough.

It was, in fact, the most honest prayer I had ever prayed in twenty-two years of occupying churches.

The service moved toward its close.

The pastor said, “If you’re here for the first time today, we want to welcome you. Our follow-up team will be at the side door after the service. Please come and see them. We have something for you and we’d love to meet you properly.”

I had planned to leave before the end.

I had told myself this in the flat.

“You’ll leave when you need to. No pressure. No performance.”

But I sat through the end.

I don’t fully know why. Maybe the one tear. Maybe I don’t know how to do this but I think I want to. Maybe simply the quality of this room, which had not required me to perform anything for the past ninety minutes and which was the most genuinely unpressurized space I had been in since Brewed café.

I stayed.

And when the service ended and people began to move and the announcement was made again — First-timers, please come to the side door. Picked up my bag.

I went to the side door.

MAUTIN’S POV

I was talking to Biodun from the follow-up unit when I saw her.

It took a second for my brain to confirm what my eyes had already registered. Because the context was wrong, because Ọrọ Adekunle in CCI Yaba on a Sunday morning was a piece of information that needed a moment to find the right folder.

She was walking toward the side door. Black dress. Gold earrings. Her Bible — a navy blue one, I could see it in her bag from here. Her face was doing what her face did when she had just been through something and was deciding what to do with it. The particular stillness of her jaw. Her eyes slightly more open than usual.

She had been here.

She had been here the whole service and she had not told me she was coming and she had stayed until the end.

I said something to Biodun. I don’t remember what. Then, I moved toward the side door.

There were thirteen other first-timers in the welcome area. I was supposed to be facilitating the whole group. Brief information session, welcome gift, the photograph that got printed and given to them before they left. It was my unit. I knew the process.

I caught her eye.

Something moved across her face that she controlled immediately. Not embarrassment. It was something… something more complicated. The expression of someone who has been seen in a place they didn’t announce they were going to be.

I walked over.

“Ọrọ”, I said.

“Hi”, she said. Two syllables. Carrying approximately forty things.

I looked at her for a moment. I wanted to ask how long she had been there, whether the service had reached her, what the face that she was wearing meant. I asked none of these things.

“Welcome, Home”, I said instead.

Simply. The word landing the way I meant it. Not the formal welcome-to-our-church welcome. The other kind.

Something in her face shifted slightly.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Come.”

I gestured toward the small group gathering near the welcome table.

“There’s a brief information session. Five minutes. Then we take a photo — they print it here, you leave with it. It’s a whole thing.”

She looked at the group. The small assessment I had watched her do in every room she entered. Calculating, measuring and deciding. Then she looked back at me.

“Okay”, she said.

We went to the table.

The information session was brief. I had done this many times. New attendees, welcome pack, overview of the church’s community, the MAP groups, Membership Class, the various units. I knew the flow. I could do it in my sleep.

But I was aware, in the corner of my attention the whole time, of Ọrọ. Sitting at the end of the small row. Listening with the full-body attention she gave things that mattered. Not performing listening but actually doing it. Her hands in her lap. Not pulled against each other, which was what they did when she was anxious. Just resting.

Something about her was different from the office Ọrọ.

Not the dress. I had seen her in non-office clothes before, on that Saturday morning outside the akara place, which I had not thought about as much as I was claiming not to think about it. It was something else. Something about the particular quality of her stillness today.

She had been in the service. Really in it.

I could see that she had.

When the information session finished and the welcome gifts were being distributed — a small bag, a daily confession pack, a signed note from the pastor — I moved to where she was standing slightly apart from the rest of the group.

“Photo time”, I said.

She looked at the camera setup. A volunteer with a small printer attached to a camera, the kind that produced a physical photograph in thirty seconds. Old-fashioned and entirely deliberate because there is something about leaving with an image of yourself in this place on this day.

“They print it now?” she said.

“Before you walk out the door”, I confirmed.

She looked at the camera.

“I’m going to look like I’ve been crying”, she said.

Flat and factual.

I looked at her. Then I asked,

“How was the service for you?”

She met my eyes briefly.

“Not… it wasn’t bad,” she said. “It was—”

She stopped. Started again.

“The prayer. The communal prayer. I couldn’t—”

She stopped again.

I waited.

“I wanted to”, she said. “I just didn’t know how.”

I looked at her for a moment.

“That counts”, I said.

She looked at me.

“What counts?”

“Wanting to. That counts.”

I held her gaze.

“God doesn’t need the words. He reads the wanting.”

She pressed her lips together. Looked away briefly. Then back.

“Okay”, she said quietly.

“Go take the picture”, I said.

“You don’t look like you’ve been crying. You look like someone who just came from a place that mattered.”

She looked at me for one second.

Then she went to take the photo.

I watched her stand in front of the camera. The volunteer said something — smile, or don’t, whatever feels right — and Ọrọ did something in between. Not the correct smile. Not a performance of happiness. Just her face, present, in this place, on this Sunday. The camera clicked. Thirty seconds later the print came out.

She held it.

She looked at it for a moment, at the image of herself in a church she hadn’t been in two hours ago, holding her Bible, looking more settled than she usually allowed herself to look in public.

She put it carefully in her bag.

She came back to where I was standing.

“So”, she said. “Are you here every Sunday?”

“Every Sunday”, I confirmed.

“And the MAP group—” She hesitated. “Makinde-Amodu Estate. That’s—”

“A ten-minute walk from your building”, I said. “Yes.”

She looked at me.

“You knew where I lived.”

“I’ve known since the Saturday at the akara place,” I said.

“You said two streets. I know which two streets.”

Something moved across her face that she let stay there longer than she usually allowed things to stay.

“And you didn’t say anything.”

“It wasn’t my information to announce”, I said.

She looked at me steadily.

“You are a very strange person, Mautin.”

“I’ve been told”, I said.

She almost smiled. The real one. Small, slow, arriving in her eyes before her mouth. I had seen it three times in fourteen months of working together and I was keeping count in the folder I wasn’t keeping count in.

“Will you come back next week?” I asked.

She was quiet for a moment. The genuine consideration. Not the deflection kind. She was actually thinking about it.

“I think so”, she said.

“Good”, I said.

A pause. The kind of pause that happened between us which was not uncomfortable and not empty. The kind that had content in it that neither of us was naming yet.

“Mautin”, she said.

“Yes.”

“The pastor said—”

She stopped.

“He said God is at the door. Has been at the door. Quietly. Consistently.”

She looked at me.

“Is that — is that true? In your experience? Does it actually feel like that?”

I looked at her.

This was the question underneath all the other questions. I had heard it asked in many different forms over the years. By new attendees, by people returning after long absences, by people who had inherited a faith they didn’t yet inhabit. The question that dressed itself as theology but was actually autobiography.

Is this real? Has He actually been there? For me specifically? Even after the eighteen months?

I thought about how to answer it honestly.

“Yes”, I said.

“In my experience. He doesn’t leave the door. He doesn’t move on to someone who is more ready or less complicated. He just stays. And knocks. Quietly. In ways that are easy to miss if you’re not listening.”

I paused.

“The fact that you heard it today, sitting in the back row after eighteen months, that is a knock.”

She looked at me.

“He knows your name, Ọrọ”, I said.

“I don’t mean the version you bring to the office or to pitch meetings or to the careful management of how people see you. The whole name. Ọrọoluwa. The one underneath everything. And He is not frightened by it.”

I held her gaze.

“God is knocking at the door of your heart. He has been this whole time. He is still knocking. Right now. Today. And He will keep knocking because He does not give up on the people He made.”

The church courtyard around us. People leaving, talking, the Sunday afternoon beginning outside. The sunlight coming through the entrance doors. The welcome gifts in their bags.

Ọrọ looked at me for a long moment.

“How do you open it?” she said. “The door.”

“You just did”, I said.

“Coming here. Staying. Wanting to pray and not knowing how. That’s you opening the door.”

She was quiet.

“The rest”, I said, “God handles. You just have to keep showing up.”

She looked at the entrance doors. At the Sunday outside.

Then she looked back at me.

“Same time next week?” she said.

And I, Mautin Hundeyin, who had a folder he was not examining, who had been told by God to simply be her friend and partner in her growth, who had been watching this woman from across offices and kitchens and bookshops and boardrooms for months. I felt something in my chest that I was going to close the folder on immediately.

“Same time next week”, I said.

She nodded once.

She walked toward the door.

At the entrance she stopped and turned back. Not a full turn, just enough.

“Mautin.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“For—”

She gestured slightly.

“All of this. The books. The… All of it.”

I nodded once.

“Go home”, I said.

“Eat something. Read chapter one of Naked and Unashamed if you haven’t.”

She blinked.

“How did you know Coach Smart gave me that?”

“Because she gives everyone that”, I said.

She looked at me for one more second.

Then she left.

I stood in the CCI Yaba foyer and watched her go. The black dress, the gold earrings, the bag with the photograph and the Bible inside it — and I closed the folder deliberately.

God said, “Be her friend”.

I was being her friend.

That was all this was.

I closed the folder.

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